Kelly ChastainMarch 5, 2026

How to Plan a Writing Session So You Actually Get Shit Done

Today we kick off our first Writing Community Hour over at The Rogue MFA YouTube channel. We gather every other Thursday at 4pm PST/ 7pm EST. The complete schedule is listed on our community page.

Bri put together a great post called 5 Ways to Write When you’re Not Writing, because sometimes you’re motivated, but maybe not necessarily inspired. We can also help you get unstuck. If you want to join, but you don’t know what to do in the hour this graphic can help.

No matter where you’re at, we can’t wait to hang out with you and get some writing done together. Here are a few more ways to approach it.

If You Want to Finish Something

There’s nothing quite like the dopamine rush of checking a box or crossing something off a list.

  • Write a character’s backstory that outlines their internal conflicts, their trauma responses, and why they’re just so darn stubborn/independent/brazen/nihilistic
  • Clean up that one scene that you know isn’t quite working, and that you’ve been avoiding, because you think it’s going to take way more time or work than it actually will
  • Write a list of the worst things that could happen to your characters, followed by a list of scenarios that will bring the worst to life, followed by a list of ways each character might each handle the scenario. (Hello, nascent plot outline)
  • Read the articles you’ve been saving in your “research file” instead of just squirreling them away like a bushy-tailed archivist
  • Write the pivotal emotional moment for your characters that you’ve been avoiding. This could be anger, a confession, declarations of love, grief, etc…

If You Want to Figure Something Out

When things stop being inspiring, or you know that something’s just off, here are some questions you can ask to help get you back on track.

  • Do my characters make choices or do things just happen to them? OR if they’re making choices, do they actually have consequences? If your character didn’t get what they wanted, and would be fine after a nap and a snack, the stakes aren’t high enough. Let them make a decision that could fuck their whole life up.
  • What character could I remove entirely without it impacting the plot? Who’s not earning their keep here, or which characters are doing the same work in the story? Sometimes we run out of steam because we’re writing the same scenario, relationship, or problem with two separate side characters when one would be far more potent. Redundancy can make your work drag.
  • What promise did I make in the first chapter and am I delivering on it? This helps you to identify where your B plot may have taken over to the point where the whole book has shifted. It’ll shed light on where you’ve gone off course in the story, and how to get yourself back on track.
  • What would happen if I cut my favorite scene? Oh, this one’s a heart breaker. Especially when you love it and it’s the most beautiful writing in the whole book. A beautifully written scene that doesn’t belong will run your story off the rails and not in a good way. You can always paste the language into a new doc and use it in a later project, so it’s not gone forever. But the key is to get honest about whether or not it’s serving your story. If not, give it the boot.
  • What feedback do I keep hearing and also keep dismissing? Sometimes it’s not the feedback itself, but the mountain of work required to fix the issues. Once we dig into it, we often find it’s not nearly as hard as we made ourselves believe it would be. Sometimes, we dismiss feedback because it isn’t immediately obvious to us how to fix the issue. You have an hour to brainstorm ideas.

If You Want to Improve Your Writing

Choose one scene where something important happens and:

  • Focus on your character’s interiority. Instead of focusing only on what they do, dig into what they think, feel, and fear in that moment. What connections and conclusions have they drawn? What do they believe, know, or understand that they didn’t before this scene started? Help your readers see the change.
  • Focus on your character’s movement. Sometimes, you’ve created a rich inner world, but the characters themselves feel like they’re floating in space or the conversation reads like talking heads in a room. Get into their movements, mannerisms, and body language that supports or belies their inner state.
  • Ratchet up the sensory details. We understand the world through our senses, and when you add sensory detail to your story, your world and characters feel more real to us. Rely less on sight, and see how you can incorporate smell, sounds, taste, and touch, particularly texture. If you want guidance, grab the free mini course, and use that as your structure for the community writing hour.
  • Sharpen your dialogue. Cut it by 30% and you’ll make it faster, less monologue-y, and it will sound more like real people talking. Let them cut each other off, stammer, change the subject, and tell each other no.

We can’t wait to see you at The Rogue Community Writing Hour!

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Bri CastelliniFebruary 26, 2026

5 Ways To Write When You’re Not Writing

So you want to build routine, you want to be more productive, perhaps you want to join us next week for our first weekly Writing Community Hour over on The Rogue MFA YouTube channel every other Thursday evening starting March 5th 4pm PST/ 7pm EST?! But you might not have an active work in progress, or perhaps you’ve got that dastardly writer’s block, or you just don’t have the energy to pull stories out onto a page, even if, in theory, you’re available and want to be creative.

Great news! As I mentioned in last week’s post, there are plenty of aspects of the creative process that aren’t strictly words-on-page. In fact, some of the most important aspects of writing have nothing to do with hitting a word or page count goal.

So today, we’re talking about the 5 ways to write… even when you aren’t technically writing.

  1. Start/continue your writer’s wish list. This concept comes from a book that my friend read and then told me about; alas, I remember the friend, but not the book of origin. The concept is pretty simple: a writer’s wish list is a list of everything you want to write someday, in as much or little detail as you have, just to keep track of all those fragments until you’re ready to commit to piecing them together. Some items off my wish list, as an example: “food service superhero,” the line of dialog “I’m not old faithful!”, “Something in a car” (that one’s a script idea, specifically), and “couple rebuilding a house in a hurricane while breaking up.”
    1. There’s a version of this I learned in my UCLA Extension Romance Writing course called the “Id List” by Jennifer Lynn Barnes which also may resonate- the difference is that the Id List focuses more on tropes and scenarios within stories that may get repeated, for you to look through when you’re stuck or feeling uninspired by your scene to give you a shot of adrenaline. My Id list includes: “One syllable androgynous names for female characters,” “epistolary elements,” and “malicious compliance.”
  2. Interview your characters, either by filling out one of the million character building templates online (perhaps we’ll need to make our own soon…) or by literally demanding answers from them yourself. Seriously, I have been known to fill 10+ pages of a conversation between myself and a character or two who are giving me trouble. Since I got into scriptwriting, that’s been a faster way of switching voices on page, but I’ve often found it to be a cathartic way of unblocking myself and treating my characters like full people, rather than just convenient vehicles for theme and trauma. And because it’s a conversation, it doesn’t really FEEL like writing so much as it feels like transcribing.
  3. Do the boring admin stuff you’ve been avoiding. This can include, per the usual QueryManager fields:
    1. Writing a 1-2 sentence logline for your latest project
    2. Writing a 2 page synopsis
    3. Writing your query letter
    4. Writing a list of comps
    5. Writing your author bio
    6. Writing an artist statement for fellowships/contests
    7. Organizing all this stuff into a singular place for easy access/editing
  4. Do a tarot reading. My friend Christine introduced this idea to me; when she’s stuck or still figuring things out in the outlining phase, she’ll sometimes do a tarot reading for her characters. She knows the questions they have, because they’re her questions too, and often doing a tarot reading unlocks aspects of where to go next she wouldn’t have considered before.
    1. Our guide to getting unstuck can aid you on what the best questions to ask are
  5. Read a chapter of a craft book/read a craft article. I don’t know about you, but I’ve confessed to Kelly previously the completely irrational primal fear of Story Genius by Lisa Cron, a book Kelly recommended to me six years ago (if not more). Why? Because I’m not in school so it’s not precisely homework, and I can’t take time out of my day ordinarily to read as if it were work, but after work, when I’m reading, I want it to be fun reading. Like time-traveling Robin Hood smut, you know? So it’s become thing source of shame and guilt despite knowing it will be good for me to dedicate time to. Now if only I had a not-quite-work, not-quite-play series of accountability sessions where I could fit in at least half an hour of reading from this book on a regular basis…

The best writing process is one where you show up. Even if showing up doesn’t add to your total word count.

Great news- you don’t have to do it alone! Join the Rogue Writing Community Hour over on The Rogue MFA YouTube channel every other Thursday evening at 4pm PST/ 7pm EST starting March 5th. We’ll be building routine and community with YOU! Subscribe to get notified, and if you’re even a little bit interested, please fill out our quick survey so we can expand these in the future with you in mind!

“Read” this post as a YouTube video instead, if you’re so inclined!

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Bri CastelliniFebruary 19, 2026

How I’ve Written 8 Manuscripts in 4 Years With One Secret Weapon

I’ve finished eight romance novel manuscripts (ranging from 68k-115k words per book) since 2022, and there are two primary things I can attribute that success to:

  1. My pathological need for challenges with daily data and badges to earn (see: the now-defunct November National Novel Writing Month challenge)
  2. Building routines and accountability with regular writing community co-working sessions

We’ll get to my obsessive need to see my progress in spreadsheet/Girl Scout badge format another time, but for now, let’s talk building a co-working writing community.

Now, of course, this concept is nothing new- we wrote about it last week! If you’ve ever met a friend at a cafe with your laptop or notebook to work separately together, you’ve built a micro-writing community. But the older I get, and the more community I build outside of my immediate geographical area, the harder it’s become to gather people for the purposes of productivity.

Would you believe my friends prioritize “just having a nice conversation” or “doing something non-monetizeable” when they make plans with me?!

But it’s rare I came out of a “nice conversation” with a fellow writer friend of mine without both bemoaning our lack of progress on a passion project, or a lackluster showing for a New Years Resolution about writing more regularly, or just generally making time for being creative amidst life, family, work, etc.

These days, not a week goes by that I don’t get at least an hour or two of writing done, and usually closer to five, and that’s with a bustling freelance schedule, a full plate of family obligations, a digital marketing class I’m taking in the evening, and a very needy dog (scroll to the bottom for a picture- she’s worth it!). Soon I’ll guarantee an extra hour per week… and perhaps you will too?

How?!

Creative co-working with a writing community, friend! Here’s the 2 vital aspects, to my mind:

  1. A reliable friend: there are many creative people in my life who I love dearly and who I would not invite to a creative co-working community, because we do not have the same work style, or because they can’t commit to a schedule, or because they can’t be in a cafe or a Zoom without gabbing the whole time.
  2. A regular, repeatable schedule: showing up at the same time on the same day every week, ideally, but at the very least, at the end of each session, schedule the next one.

That’s it! Now, because I’m me, I like to make things more structured, but as a starting point, this is just about accountability, and having a buddy to force you to show up.

Need a buddy? Here we are! We host community writing hour every other Thursday at 4pm PST/ 7pm EST over on YouTube. Won’t you join us?

How we run a writing community co-working session

  • 10 minutes: catching up, checking in, general chatting, info-dumping on my latest romance novel fixation
  • 5 minutes: focusing in on what our writing challenges have been recently and what we want to work on for this session
  • 20 minutes: focused silent writing time
  • 5 minutes: break! Chat about how it went, ask for advice, share a favorite line, grab a snack, go to the bathroom, etc
  • 20 minutes: focused silent writing time
  • 5 minutes: break!
  • 20 minutes: focused silent writing time
  • 5-10 minutes: check in on how it went, make plans for next session

The simplest version I do with some friends, though, is merely:

  • 10-15 minutes: catching up, checking in, general chatting
  • 5 minutes: focusing in on what our writing challenges have been recently and what we want to work on for this session
  • ~1 hour: focused writing time (or however long we set aside)
  • 5-10 minutes: check in on how it went, make plans for next session

I prefer the mini sprints to one long session, for my neurospicy brain as well as because I’ve noticed I get more productive the less time I have to be productive within. It’s the same reason I can write 60k words in a month when I’m being externally challenged to do so, but without that framework I struggle to write 5k in the same amount of time.

The other benefit is that mini-sprints allow for me to shift my focus to different elements of my process rather than banging my head against a single wall the whole time. More on that next week, though.

Ultimately, it’s entirely up to you what your brain and working style comes up with- as long as it’s repeatable, sustainable, and working, good on ya!

Also, taking regular breaks while working/studying is apparently “good for you” or whatever.

The benefits of creative co-working

  1. Building routine. I’ll be honest: last year, there were several sessions I did with my Monday friend (my friend I write with on Mondays) where writing… did not get done. However, unless we had to cancel due to scheduling conflicts, we showed up week after week regardless. This meant our standing meeting didn’t slip away, we didn’t get into the habit of making other plans, and we trained our brains to show up and sit in place once a week with the intention, even if we didn’t always succeed in execution, of writing.
  2. Priming yourself for creativity. When I know, because of my routine, that I’m writing with someone that day, you know what I’m doing up until I show up? Thinking about writing! About what I specifically plan to write that day, about a challenge I’m having with my latest project, about the world I’m going to spend time in. That anticipation is a vital part of the writing process, and it’s part of the process we don’t get if we don’t have an expectation of being creatively productive that day
  3. Building community. Not only is it easier to be accountable when someone else is watching, but writing novels can often be a solitary pursuit in ways that don’t always serve us creatively. Surrounding yourself with other writers is incredibly important for solidarity, for feedback, hell, for sanity! Not to mention, now you have someone to practice your pitch to, or ask for brainstorming support when you need it, or to brag about inventing the concept of “MSG cum” for your new fated mates alien sci-fi romance (don’t ask) (unless you REALLY want to know)

Sold? Maybe you’d like to join us for Writing Community Hour over on The Rogue MFA YouTube channel every other Thursday evening at 4pm PST/ 7pm EST. The full calendar of dates is on our Community page.  Subscribe to get notified, and if you’re even a little bit interested, please fill out our quick survey so we can expand these in the future with you in mind.

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